


Lost on the Night Shift

by Sholio



Category: Luke Cage (TV), The Defenders (Marvel TV)
Genre: Gen, Ghosts, Halloween
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-19
Updated: 2019-10-19
Packaged: 2020-12-24 00:51:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,622
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21090641
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/pseuds/Sholio
Summary: Claire spends Halloween night playing hide and seek with a little runaway in the ER.





	Lost on the Night Shift

**Author's Note:**

  * For [rhosyn_du](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rhosyn_du/gifts).

Night shift on Halloween is the _worst_ \-- drunken frat kids, face paint allergies, poisoning cases that turn out to be too much Halloween candy, the never-ending fun of trying to tell fake blood from real blood, and of course an entire waiting room and treatment suite full of people dressed like Wonder Woman and President Bush and Frankenstein. Claire is arguing with a very drunken woman dressed like a Sexy Nurse(TM), who seems to think she's a real nurse and won't let Claire get near her with the antibiotic shot she needs for the stitches she got across her forehead after taking a fall on the sidewalk outside a Greenwich Village bar, when she hears cheerful giggling from across the ER. 

Looking up, Claire spots a delighted little face peeking at her from under the crash cart pulled up to the curtained-in treatment room next door. All she can see from here is that it's a very small child, and there are no adults near her at all.

"Malik!" she calls to a passing orderly. "Could you see if you can get Florence Nightingale here to take her medicine?"

She leaves the wannabe nurse drunkenly explaining to Malik that she _does not_ have Ebola and therefore does not need the shot, and goes over to look for the unattended kid, who has of course vanished in the 0.5 seconds that Claire took her eyes off her. Then she hears another little giggle and looks over to see the kid peeking at her from around the edge of the swinging doors leading into the surgical suite.

Okay, no, no, _nope._ Claire hustles over and grabs the little girl by her small arm as she tries to duck away. She's a cute kid, with a round little face, pigtails, and a flowered dress. Claire would guess her age at about five or six.

"Where's your mom?" she asks. "Is Mama around here somewhere?"

"Mama!" The little girl giggles again, and rattles off something that Claire can almost catch, but not quite. Italian, maybe?

"Right," Claire says with a sigh, and picks her up. The kid promptly puts her little arms around Claire's neck. "Did you come in with your dad? Your grandparents?"

"Mama," the little girl sighs.

"Is Mama in the hospital? What's your name?"

The only answer is a sudden intense squirming that startles Claire so much that she nearly lets the child drop. "Candy!" the girl squeals, in English.

"No -- erk --" Claire is now being strangled as the child tries to escape.

The ER at Halloween, like probably every other workplace around the city, has the usual trappings of the season, which include baskets of candy on every desktop, draped with fake spiderwebs; basically anything they can get away with and not violate the fairly stringent workplace safety regs for the ER. Claire sighs and dips a hand into the basket, coming up with a couple of sugar-free mini candy bars. "Okay, I am going to put you at the duty station and you'll stay there and wait for Mama, okay?"

"Candy?"

"Yes," she says, "but only if you're good until I put you with _la señora_ at the desk. Do you understand?"

"No," the child says, and giggles.

"Yes, you do." Claire pokes her and there's a delighted squeal. She deposits the little girl behind the duty desk and gives her the candy bars. "Sarah, I'm so sorry. Can you watch her for a minute, please, and put out an announcement on the PA about a lost child?"

"What's that?" the receptionist asks, turning around.

"Could you announce a lost child in the ER, and keep an eye on her, please? Now sit here," she instructs the little girl, and switches to Spanish in the hopes it'll help; there's some mutual intelligibility, if not enough for fluency. "Señora Sarah will take care of you, okay?"

Claire leaves the kid stuffing her face with candy bars and hurries back just in time to find herself confronted with an injured man in a mime costume who insists on conveying his symptoms in pantomime.

She really hates working on Halloween.

*

She's just handled a dog bite and a peanut allergy (third of the night; they always pick up around Halloween with all the nut-filled chocolates), and she's grabbing a sandwich from the cafeteria vending machine when she hears a giggle. Looking around, Claire spots a familiar little face peeking at her from under a table in the nearly empty cafeteria.

"Really?" She'd like to get pissed off at Sarah, but she knows how hectic it gets on the desk. She's more annoyed at the kid's parents. "Hey, little girl," she says, switching to Spanish. "You want something healthy to go with your candy?"

She gets a bottle of milk from the vending machine, and takes her sandwich over to the table. The little girl crawls up and sits in a chair, and Claire gives her the bottle of milk and part of her cheese sandwich.

"Where's your Mama?" Claire asks. All she gets is a shrug, though to be fair, the kid's mouth is full of sandwich. "What's your name? Swallow first, then answer," she adds hastily. "I'm Claire." She plants her hand on her chest before holding it out invitingly.

"Rosa," the child says, and drinks her milk.

"Hmm. We gotta find your parents, Rosa. You can't be running around the ER unsupervised. Where are Mama and Papa?"

Another shrug.

"Your grandparents?"

Shrug.

"Aunt and uncle?"

"Hey, Temple!" It's Jason, leaning into the cafeteria. "Sorry, I know you're on break, but we just got a three-vehicle accident, and they're coming in now. We need you out here."

Claire mutters a few words that would have her mother giving her a disappointed look, and scoops up Rosa. "Okay, look, kid. I got nowhere to put you, so I'm taking you up to the security station, okay? You can finish my sandwich there. It looks like I'm not going to get a chance. Story of my life."

"Yucky cheese."

"Yes, well, you take what you can get at two in the morning in the cafeteria, kiddo."

She's halfway upstairs when the PA announces _All available nurses to the ER_ and just then, there's her favorite security guard turning the corner, Rico. Best of all, he speaks Italian. "Rico," she calls. "I gotta run back down. See if you can get this little one back with her folks, okay?"

She shoves the kid at a startled Rico and hurries back down, and for the next couple of hours she's got her mind too deep in her work to even think about little lost girls in the ER.

*

It seems like forever until they're through victim triage, and she scrubs down and then collapses for a minute on an unused bed -- only to open her eyes a minute later when the bed dips by her hip and there's her little friend Rosa, hands on her pudgy little knees, grinning at her.

"Really?" Claire says, propping herself up on her elbows. Rosa giggles and covers her face with her hands. "So Rico is completely useless at keeping an eye on lost kids, huh? Come on, little heart, let's see if we can find someone up on the Pediatric floor who can watch you for more than five minutes ..."

"Claire!" That's Aiza, one of the other nurses, calling in. "I'm sorry, hon, but we just got an overdose _and_ a broken arm, and we really need you out here."

"Coming!" she calls back, and sits up. Damn it, she can't just leave the kid running around loose in the ER, but she doesn't have time to take her anywhere. She sits up and scoops up Rosa, who cuddles against her trustingly. "Okay, I'm going to have to leave you somewhere, okay? I'll be back to get you soon."

She can't put the kid in a supply closet -- there's too much that's dangerous, especially for a child as inquisitive and energetic as Rosa clearly is -- so Claire uses her pass key to unlock the unused waiting room for a cardiac surgical suite that's closed at this time of night. "Stay here, okay?" she says, putting Rosa down in the pile of donated books and toys provided for waiting kids. "I'll be back in just a few minutes, I swear." And not without a twinge of guilt, she locks the kid in, then takes time she _really_ can't spare to drop by the nurse's station. It has occurred to her that she never heard the announcement the first time. "Sarah, could you announce a lost child on the PA? She's in the cardiac waiting room on 4."

This time the announcement goes out and Claire hurries to her duties. Five minutes, she thinks, and then she'll drop in on the kid and make sure someone's doing something.

*

It's more like half an hour when Claire comes back to collect her. "Rosa?" she calls, opening the door onto an apparently empty room. After a quick search, she decides it is in fact empty. Someone must have collected the kid. Claire firmly attempts to squash down her guilt. An ER isn't a safe place for a small child, but the ER is also full of medical professionals who would have worked as hard as Claire has been trying to work to get Rosa back where she belongs.

"Don't get lost again, okay?" she says to empty air, and for an instant she thinks she hears the echo of a childish giggle, but it's probably the air conditioning.

*

Dawn is starting to break outside the glass doors of the ER when she's finally off shift. She works an extra half-hour helping stabilize a teenage kid who almost drowned in a pool at some rich uptown family's Halloween party, and then she's finally off. She collects her street clothes from her locker, and Kathy, morning shift worker at the desk, gives her a handful of candy to take home, and then she wobbles wearily out to her car in the employee parking garage. She sinks behind the wheel, drops her head wearily against the headrest, and --

There's a little giggle from the backseat.

Claire nearly jumps out of her skin and looks over her shoulder. Rosa is lying in the backseat; she looks like she's been napping on Claire's old gray sweater that she keeps around to wrap up in on cold nights. Now she's sitting up, rubbing her eyes.

The car was locked. Claire is sure of it.

"What are you doing here, little one?" she asks quietly.

The answer is a sleepy mix of Italian and English, of which Claire can only pick up about half, but she gathers enough to know that Rosa is saying she's tired, and wants to go home.

"Home," Claire murmurs. "Where's home for you, Rosa?"

She wants to go home too, but she can't just run off with someone else's kid. Stroke of luck: Rico the security guard has just come into the parking garage, going off-shift too. Claire rolls her window down and waves him over. "Hey man," she says, "I've got a stowaway back here. Remember that kid I dumped on you earlier?"

Rico grins at her. "I remember you said something like 'Here, hold this,' and ran off."

"The _kid,_ Rico." Claire gestures to the backseat. "I need to get her up to Social Services."

Rico peers into the car, looks at her, and says with a laugh, "You working too hard, Temple? There's no one back there."

Claire looks back. Rosa is there, sitting on Claire's sweater, swinging her feet. And Claire takes a deep breath, and tries to think back to whether anyone else seemed to see Rosa, or talk to her, all night. No wonder there was no message on the PA.

Maybe if she wasn't so busy, and so tired, she would have worked it out sooner. 

"Sorry, man," she says, forcing a smile. "I guess it's been a really long night."

"Halloween shifts will do that to you. Get home safe."

"You too." She waves him off, and looks back at Rosa with a deep sigh. The little girl yawns. "Where is home, Rosa? Can you show me how to take you home?"

Rosa rubs her eyes, and then she nods. "Sí."

"Okay then," Claire murmurs, and puts the car in gear.

*

The sky is bright above the city skyline, flushed with dawn. Rosa curls up in the backseat and gives her sleepy directions, mostly of the "Turn here, señora!" variety. And then suddenly she sits up; Claire glimpses her movement in the rearview mirror. "Mama!" she says happily.

Claire looks back with a smile. "Did we find her, sweetheart --?"

The backseat is empty. The morning sun, just risen, touches Claire's rumpled sweater with gold.

There's nowhere to park, but Claire double-parks anyway and gets out of the car.

She sees it only because she's looking for it. She would have driven right past it -- probably _has_ been past it a hundred times. It could easily be mistaken for a garden or a yard, but there's a tiny little fragment of a cemetery here, tucked up where two buildings meet at an angle. An iron fence shuts it off from the sidewalk. Claire stands at the fence and looks in. It's just big enough for a handful of graves. The stones are old-looking and crowded close together.

She's heard of places like this. A city of this size probably has many of them, remnants of old cemeteries with the city grown up around them. Sometimes old graves are moved; sometimes they're forgotten, lost, and paved over. And sometimes they wait, like this, for someone to find them.

This little cemetery is not completely forgotten. The graves have scraggly clumps of grass instead of a lawn (this far down beneath the buildings, it doesn't look like it gets much sun), but the weeds have been pulled, and one of the graves has fresh flowers.

There's also some trash along the edge. Claire leans in and picks it up: a paper cup, a candy wrapper.

She finds Rosa's grave in the process. It's tiny, child-sized, and tucked right in the corner where the little scrap of a cemetery meets the building. _Rosa Antonetti, 1917-1923._ Rosa's grave is tended like the others -- someone does come here -- but there are no flowers for her.

Claire looks at that for a while.

"I'm glad you got home okay," she says quietly; it's all she really can say. She has to get home, too.

*

But she comes back that evening, before her shift. It's growing dark, and she has to search a little to find that one particular corner, where two buildings meet, leaving just enough space for four or five graves and a fence.

The fence is locked, but Claire takes a long look around and then climbs over.

She has with her a cheery plastic basket shaped like a pumpkin, filled with half-off Halloween candy, and a stuffed bear tucked into the top.

"Hi, Rosa," she murmurs, and leaves the basket tucked carefully between the headstone and the concrete side of the building, where it won't be easily visible from the street and therefore not quite so much of a target for passersby.

She feels as if she should say more, but she's not really sure what. There are other Antonettis on a couple of nearby headstones, so at least Rosa isn't alone.

"Feel free to come back and visit next year, _corazoncita_," she murmurs at last. "You made a busy night more interesting. I'd like to play with you again. I'll make sure to have plenty of candy for you."


End file.
